.net – Distributing microsoft.visualstudio.texttemplating.dll with custom app

licensingnett4templatesvisual studio

We are writing an app that will use T4 to generate Flex/Actionscript to compile into SWF. We would like to distribute this app to users who will not have VS. I've searched and searched and could not find any info anywhere on redistributing microsoft.visualstudio.texttemplating.dll with your apps, except on this code plex project (http://customtemplating.codeplex.com/) that allows hosting your own T4 builder (which uses and does include a copy of microsoft.visualstudio.texttemplating.dll).

So, does anyone know for sure or could tell me where I can find info on including this dll in our app?

Thank you in advance!
Ilya

Best Answer

I wrote a cleanly reverse-engineered implementation of a T4 engine for the MonoDevelop IDE. It's open-source, licensed under the permissive MIT/X11 license, so you are free to embed the engine in your app or redistribute it. There's also an implementation of the TextTransform.exe command-line tool, and some APIs in the Mono.TextTemplating namespace to aid in hosting the engine.

The only real missing feature right now is custom directive providers - but patches for this are welcome :-)

You can get the code from monodevelop/main/src/addins/TextTemplating in Mono SVN.

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